1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed generally to communication sessions with stateless services.
2. Description of the Related Art
Stateless messaging services including the Short Message Service (SMS) allow for exchanges of text messages between two devices such as wireless phones including cellular phones and other communication devices. In addition to the text, a sender's message generally contains the telephone number or other device identifier of the sender's communication device.
Although stateless messaging allows for a receiving device to identify the sending device of a message, there is nothing inherent in a stateless messaging service that provides further contextual information. If a first device sends out a number of first messages to a second device and the second device sends one message to reply to a particular one of the first messages, the first device will not be able to determine which of the first messages is being responded to without additional information contained in the text portion of the particular one of the first messages.
This lack of contextual information can be problematic for systems such as survey systems or expert systems that may use a stateless messaging service such as SMS for sending messages that request content regarding a survey, guidance to be furnished, or other specific purpose of the system. Conventional solutions have required users to key in various identifiers, such as a keyword for the server application involved, and/or other keywords or alphanumeric data to identify the session and message. This identifier input requiring data entry, such as by keying, is in addition to the content furnished in response to a content request found in a message sent from the application server. This amount of keying related to identifier information is in addition to that expected by users to furnish content requested by a server application so potentially can cause a degree of annoyance for the users.
The separate identifier keywords and other alphanumeric data can then be used by the conventional approaches to determine to which server application, session, and message a response message is being sent in reply. Annoyance for users can be further increased when further complications arise when the number of concurrent sessions between an application server and a particular communication device increases due to additional applications on the server being concurrently used by the communication device. Further complexity and annoyance can exist when multiple sessions between a server and a device uses the same server application generating a duplicate series of messages to track. As the number of messages generated for any one server application increases, complexity and annoyance can further increase. Implementing such conventional identification approaches can also be problematic for the server application since conventional approaches can require that identifier instructions be stored and maintained along with message content to be sent out by the server application.